U.S.-Russia at a crossroad for new beginnings

Wednesday

Feb 14, 2001 at 12:01 AM

U.S. aid to cure Russia's domestic health care crisis would be a key component of his prescription to improve international relations between our two nations, Wittenberg University political science professor George Hudson said Tuesday.

Hudson spent much of the time discussing strategic and regional political and military issues during his Great Decisions 2001 talk on "The Challenges of U.S.-Russia Relations," but his answer to a question about what one piece of advice to give President Bush focused on Russia's domestic problems, paramount among which is that only one Russian child in 10 is born healthy.

"I think that one thing he ought to do soon is find some way of supporting the Russian health care system," said Hudson, a former visiting Fulbright professor at Russian Open University and an expert on Soviet national security policy and arms sales. "That's something I would tell him ... to try to put some guts back into that health care system ... and, boy, could this help Russian-American relations."

We live in a time of great possibilities for Russian-American relations, Hudson said, with new national leaders in both countries and with Russia still struggling to recover economically a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It's too early to tell if the new Bush administration will be a new generation of "cold warriors" and Russophobes, Hudson said, but he still percieves "golden opportunities for new beginnings."

Although we live in a unipolar world of U.S. economic, military and cultural dominance, Russia does retain a nuclear arsenal that gives it nearly equal superpower status in that arena, Hudson said.

"Both (nations) have been reducing (strategic nuclear arsenals) ... and I think that's a very good thing," he said, but with almost 6,500 existing Russian warheads and some 7,500 in our arsenal, there are still more than enough nuclear weapons for the two powers' "mutually assured destruction."

Continuing implementation of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties I and II should reduce those warhead numbers by another 50 percent by 2007, Hudson said, with the further prospect of reductions under a possible START III agreement to national arsenals at the level of 2,000 to 2,500 warheads and some talk already by Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin of further cuts to around 1,500 warheads.

Overall relations between our two nations are much better now than 20 years ago, Hudson said, but he noted there are very different assumptions in the two nations about the future role of nuclear weapons, with Russia apparently sticking to the philosophy of mutually assured destruction, according to major statements that came out of Russia between January and June of 2000.

The anti-ballistic missile defense system that seems to be a given of U.S. military policy is not accepted by Russia, Hudson said. Its implementation could be seen as a unilateral abrogation of the two nations' 1972 ABM treaty, leading to the possibility of Russia's withdrawal from treaties on the elimination of battlefield nuclear weapons and the reduction of conventional forces in Europe and its possible resumption of nuclear warhead construction in violation of START II.

If our ballistic missile defenses are not to be directed against Russian forces, he said, there is the prospect of sharing our technology with them and building mutual defensive systems against the possibility of nuclear terrorism. But that raises the prospect of increasing tensions in Europe and China's threat to boost its nuclear arsenal from 20 nuclear warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles to some 200 of each.

"This could endanger all kinds of other agreements," Hudson said, noting there are some 30 such technical agreements in place through the U.S. Department of Defense, State Department and Department of Energy, many of them funded under legislation written by U.S. Sens. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind., as well as two privately funded non-governmental organizations working to reduce the threat of nuclear warfare, including Ted Turner's Nuclear Threat Initiative, headed by Nunn, and a similar NGO program funded by George Soros.

There are other potential sore spots in relations between our two nations, Hudson said, such as residual Russian mistrust over the 1999 U.S.-led bombing of Serbian forces in Kosovo, the expansion of NATO and the lack of U.S. understanding about Russia's fight to avoid Chechen secession.

The situation could be helped by the extension of a European Union cooperative military agreement to include Russian forces and by changes in our mass media and political leadership to more closely reflect the warmth of feeling ordinary U.S. citizens have for everyday Russians.